Russian Roulette

The gray whale breaks the surface of the Sea of Okhotsk and sets a course for the inflatable Zodiac.

The whale's head rises high in the water, exposing the yellowish baleen hanging from its jaws. It glides past the five-meter boat with ten meters to spare.

The crew stares into the eye of the whale, a split second before the animal disappears under the water.

Suddenly, the whale's head bursts through the surface twenty meters from the boat and surges toward the sky, pulling half of its forty-foot body out of the water. Casually, the 60,000-pound creature rotates onto its back as it falls into the sea with a tremendous splash.

The breaching whale triggers a round of jubilant exclamations -- even from four seasoned scientists.

They have traveled from across Russia and the United States to help create a plan to save one of the most threatened whale populations on earth. Once thought extinct, the Western Pacific grays tenaciously cling to survival, with a mere one hundred or so remaining from a family that once numbered 15,000.

The team has spent the past four summers photographing, counting and studying these whales, which have survived decades of industrial hunting only to face another lethal threat, this time on the rich feeding grounds off the northeastern coast of the Russian province of Sakhalin, a 900-kilometer-long island north of Japan.

Sakhalin's offshore oil reserves would have remained untapped -- and the whales left in peace -- were it not for a historic agreement negotiated by then U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Russian Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin in 1994.

The agreement called for multinational oil companies to provide the capital and technology to develop Sakhalin's energy fields, while Russia -- for the first time -- would allow foreign companies access to its reserves. The oil companies and Russia would split the profits. Tapping the huge energy fields could lead to more than $40 billion in investment in one of Russia's poorest regions.

None of the negotiators who hammered out the groundbreaking agreement was concerned about the impact on the whales. In fact, most assumed the Western grays were gone. Experts had declared them extinct thirty years earlier.

But the whales had a champion in California marine biologist Robert Brownell. He had argued all along that this lost tribe had not really disappeared. By the early 1980s, Russian scientists knew that a handful of Western Pacific grays returned each summer to Sakhalin, near the mouth of nutrient-rich Pil'tun Lagoon. Each winter the whales departed for points unknown -- but were believed to be in the South China Sea -- to mate and give birth.

When Brownell -- one of America's top marine mammal scientists, who also is adept in the back hallways of international politics -- blew the whistle in 1996 about the critical location of the whales' feeding grounds, there was a stunned reaction from Moscow, Washington, D.C., and oil headquarters throughout the world.

"You have to be kidding" was the response Brownell says he got.

On February 7, 1997, Gore and Chernomyrdin signed a joint statement "on measures to ensure conservation of biological diversity near Sakhalin Island." A consortium of oil companies led by Sakhalin Energy Investment Company agreed to fund the lighthouse research team with $350,000 a year.

That was the last time the United States and Russia took any significant steps to ensure the whales' survival. And our eight-month investigation reveals that environmental negligence by the oil companies and lax oversight by international lenders -- combined with inaction by environmental groups and moribund response from Russian and American government agencies -- threaten to wipe out the remaining Western Pacific gray whales.

First light brings welcome news.

"Good weather!" booms a voice from the kitchen.

The skies are clear. The fog has lifted. Seas are calm.

The seven members of the research team -- five Russians and two Americans -- scramble from their plywood bunks and quickly converge in the kitchen. The smoky cast-iron wood stove heats coffee. Fresh-baked bread is cut and smothered with cheese and jam.

Good weather doesn't come often and may not last long at the Pil'tun lighthouse camp overlooking the Sea of Okhotsk, also known to the native population as the Sea of Death.

The encampment is enchantingly rugged and quiet -- save a few hours in the evening when the diesel generator is fired up to power the beacon atop the lighthouse tower. There are no cars or roads, just pathways through the sand and scattered patches of tundra.

Isolated from the outside world -- telephone communication is restricted to a fifteen-minute window each evening via a satellite -- the four women and three men lead a rustic and simple life that naturally keeps them focused on the task at hand -- studying the gray whales.

The biologists share a twenty-meter-long wood-frame and tar-paper fourplex with the two Russian families who operate the lighthouse -- one of more than a dozen that encircle Sakhalin Island. The fourplex was badly damaged in a 1995 earthquake that leveled the nearby town of Neftegorsk, killing 2,000 people. Researchers rebuilt part of the structure, adding men's and women's bunkhouses and crafting a crude but functional kitchen out of scrap.